I have been preparing my talk for The Brief Therapy Conference in San Diego in December and I’ve just discovered an awfully big problem.

Responding to feedback from my last presentation… People want evidence.

So I looked for evidence for the major points I want to make and I can find it. Some of the studies I could use to support what I am saying are even pretty well designed, but here’s the thing. After my exploration this year, I now know that they are meaningless. You can actually find anything you are looking for in the social sciences and psychology research.

Most of the time researchers are honestly passionate about what they are exploring and don’t see the biases and allegiances they bring, and some of the time affiliations to industry, pharma, or just getting published and keeping your job or earning a crust let the rot creep in.

Even if you find a good study with seemingly none of this, it won’t be reproducible, because none of them are, and for a finding to have any scientific rigor it has to be reproducible.

And there’s another funny thing which I discovered when speaking to my brother who is a scientist. Chemistry is his thing. I could barely understand the title of his PHD, let alone what it was about.. He has embodied the science machine and chemistry has behaved itself appropriately. Being analytical has worked well for him, and I value his clarity and experience.

He is, however, also an athletics coach,  most recently an official Olympic coach. Pretty amazing achievement to manage in his spare time. Inspiring. I have spoken to him about doing the landmark forum, as I think the distinctions and experiential learning would open a whole new world for him in his coaching. He is reluctant, and would expect to walk out not being able to manage the hoopla. But here’s the thing, feedback from 2.5 million participants of the forum show that 95% get a major life altering transformation. This is way better than any therapy or coaching process. Then my brother started telling me how impressed he is with neurofeedback for coaching. Ho hum. We know that Neurofeedback, CBT, or any of the other hundreds of models are all the same. But there’s the thing… Neurofeedback is very palatable for the scientific mind and The Landmark forum is not.

And I think that’s it. We put these studies up on a slide to make what we are saying palatable to our audience. If you really see that, most presentations are like persuasive writing. We are more like journalists than serious contributors to our field.

It’s actually quite funny when you think of all the criticism Erickson got from his Ocean Monarch Lecture, when people discovered he was speaking to generate an experience so that learning could actually happen, and some people felt manipulated. If only people would get offended by the attempted manipulation anytime someone used research to make their point.

Holy toledo! What now?